Page 4394 - Week 10 - Thursday, 23 September 2010
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My motion today calls for the options that are now being considered by the government to be scrutinised by the standing committee on health to try and mitigate some of the mistakes that have been made over the last two years. I will go through those mistakes. In summary, the government misled the community. There was a complete lack of openness in their dealings. They avoided scrutiny.
There were some highly inappropriate aspects to the deal, particularly the original deal that was proposed. They ignored advice. They had a very poor consultation process. In pursuing this process they alienated large sections of the community. They botched the negotiations. They very nearly wasted $77 million of taxpayers’ money. Throughout the process they distracted ACT Health, Treasury and the Assembly from important business. Ultimately, Mr Speaker, they simply got it wrong.
I will go to those points in turn now. The first is that they misled the community. As you may recall, before the last election the health minister said that, with regard to health, “all of our deals are on the table”. That was simply not true. We know that because she had actually written to the chairman of Little Company of Mary seeking a heads of agreement. So to say “all of our deals are on the table” simply was not true. We only found out about this deal in April 2009 when it was leaked to the Canberra Times. It seems that the only time the community or the Assembly find out what is going on is when one side or the other leaks information to the Canberra Times.
I will refer back now to some of the high principle that got Mr Stanhope so aggravated when in 2001 he said:
Because integrity is one of our core values, we do not accept that the only way to govern is by deals done behind closed doors.
That is exactly what has occurred from this government for the last two years. There has been a complete lack of openness. There have been secretive, behind-closed-doors deals. In 2001, Mr Stanhope said:
Good government accepts criticism. Good government has the courage to allow itself to be closely scrutinised. It conducts its operations in an open, honest and accountable manner, not in secret.
Quite clearly, that has not been the case. This is a government—and, I would have to say, compliant with the Greens previously—that refused to allow the PricewaterhouseCoopers advice and the separate advice from that advice to be scrutinised by the Assembly and tabled in the Assembly.
As we know from Ms Gallagher’s own words, that advice was actually key to understanding the situation that we now find ourselves in. The minister spoke of the magnitude of this advice—that it had profoundly changed the direction of the government. Now we are expected, as an Assembly, to make an informed decision, but she will not give us the advice that is of such magnitude it completely changed the direction of the government. Quite clearly, they have stepped away from their own principles. I refer to another comment made by Mr Stanhope, another principle:
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